Mr. Speaker, I could not agree more. It is very important for a government to have a strong understanding as to how it wants to assist our cultural communities and it does have a very important role to play.
What I am concerned about is that the motion, however well-intentioned it may be, would take us back a step and would not allow us to make the important investments that were expressed. The motion states that we must “maintain the program policies and regulations”. I have a problem when we are stating that we have to stay the course and that we cannot move forward and help our cultural communities to ensure they will be viable and relevant into the future.
I could not agree more with my colleague that there needs to be a vibrant cultural community and that by working together with them into the future we, as government, in partnership with these cultural communities, will be able to do just that.
The motion is a situation where we have to be careful of what we ask for because we might get it and it might be exactly the reverse of what we wanted. That is probably the situation with this particular motion.